The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer — John Shaqi
The Conquest: The Story of a Negro PioneerMicheaux, Oscar
General
The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer
Micheaux, Oscar
African American pioneers -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; South Dakota -- Fiction; Western stories
The following Sunday I expected him to take me to church with him, but
he didn't. He went alone, wearing his five dollar hat, fifteen dollar
made-to-measure shoes, forty-five dollar coat and vest, eleven dollar
trousers, fifty dollar tweed overcoat and his diamonds. I found my way
to church alone and when I saw him sitting reservedly in an opposite
pew, I felt snubbed and my heart sank. However, only momentarily, for a
new light dawned upon me and I saw the snobbery and folly of it all and
resolved that some day I would rise head and shoulders above that
foolish, four-flushing brother of mine in real and material success.
I finally secured irregular employment at the Union Stock Yards. The
wages at that time were not the best. Common labor a dollar-fifty per
day and the hours very irregular. Some days I was called for duty at
five in the morning and laid off at three in the afternoon or called
again at eight in the evening to work until nine the same evening. I
soon found the mere getting of jobs to be quite easy. It was getting a
desirable one that gave me trouble. However, when I first went to the
yards and looked at the crowds waiting before the office in quest of
employment, I must confess I felt rather discouraged, but my new
surroundings and that indefinable interesting feature about these crowds
with their diversity of nationalities and ambitions, made me forget my
own little disappointments. Most all new arrivals, whether skilled or
unskilled workmen, seeking "jobs" in the city find their way to the
yards. Thousands of unskilled laborers are employed here and it seems to
be the Mecca for the down-and-out who wander thither in a last effort to
obtain employment.
The people with whom I stopped belonged to the servant class and lived
neatly in their Armour Avenue flat. The different classes of people who
make up the population of a great city are segregated more by their
occupations than anything else. The laborers usually live in a laborer's
neighborhood. Tradesmen find it more agreeable among their fellow
workmen and the same is true of the servants and others. I found that
employment which soiled the clothes and face and hands was out of
keeping among the people with whom I lived, so after trying first one
job, then another, I went to Joliet, Illinois, to work out my fortune in
the steel mills of that town. I was told that at that place was an
excellent opportunity to learn a trade, but after getting only the very
roughest kind of work to do around the mills, such as wrecking and
carrying all kinds of broken iron and digging in a canal along with a
lot of jabbering foreigners whose English vocabulary consisted of but
one word--their laborer's number. It is needless to say that I saw
little chance of learning a trade at any very early date.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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